The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd is, for more than 250 pages, one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. Our hero is a freshman at State, enrolled in art classes. He meets an older sassy wild card named Himillsy Dodd who is full of fun and big ideas. They spend [...]

Months after everyone has read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, I’m going to add a “me too” to the mess of people who added it to various “best of …” lists.
Hans is a Dutch banker, a passive go’er with the flo’er whose wife lights back to London from Manhattan after 9/11, taking their son with her. Already [...]

Northline by Willy Vlautin is the kind of book that makes me wonder if I will ever truly love a book again, or if I’m destined for reading purgatory, where everything gets three stars on Goodreads: Not quite bad enough to ditch it in the toilet tank at a truck stop, but not good enough [...]

I’m going to be brief here, because everyone should have the pleasure of reading this book without knowing a lick about it.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a tricky book to talk about. I didn’t know anything about it when I cracked into it, and 100 pages later I probably would have called [...]

In late April, 1984, Billy Gilley,18, killed his parents with a baseball bat. And when his little sister Becky wouldn’t go upstairs while he finished, he beat her, too, which eventually killed her. Jody Gilley, 16 at the time, stood frozen in her bedroom, disassociating, imagining she was a character in a book and wondering [...]

The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter: Despite the fact that Charles Baxter induces a plot amnesia that always makes me forget what his books are about within a week of reading them, I am always keenly aware while I’m reading them that this man is a word genius. In this one, Nathanial Mason’s life story [...]

Through most of Miranda July’s book of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You I was having serious creative writing major flashbacks to the mid-1990s. I had spent my 18 years before college wrapped in Catholic school bubble wrap. Everyone’s life seemed a little more interesting than mine, which made their stories more [...]

Life lesson learned about myself while reading An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke: I prefer my slapstick humor visually served up by Leslie Nielsen, as opposed to in book form, like this.
Sam Pulcifer accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson’s house and inadvertently kills a married couple that was hip-locked in [...]

Art Bechstein has just graduated from college, broken up with his girlfriend, and has an entire summer with which to play. When his father, vaguely identified as a gangster, asks him about his plans, Art answers:
“I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”
On his way out of the library [...]

After drifting for a few years, the accident-prone former Hard Ten bartender Mike Mercer is inspired to become a cop when he reads a newspaper article about a San Francisco goodwill police officer who practices his mime routine while walking his beat.
Mercer — nicknamed “Boy Thirteen” by his colleagues and the hero of Doug Dorst’s [...]